Tag: planet

You may know about Planet F-Droid, a feed aggregator that aims to collect the blogs of many free Android projects in one place. Currently all of the registered blogs are written in English (as is this post, so if you know someone who might be concerned by the matter below and is not able to understand English, please feel free to translate for them).

Recently someone suggested that we should maybe create additional feeds for blogs in other languages. I’m not sure if there is interest in having support for more languages, so that’s why I want to ask you.

Planets are a thing of the 90s, but still they are quite cool as they can bring a community closer together by helping users to exchange ideas. I hope this will also work out for the F-Droid community 🙂

For that reason I proposed to set up a planet for F-Droid / FOSS Android development in the F-Droid forum. After explaining my idea, Hans suggested that I should give it a try and go serverless by basing the setup on GitLab Pages.

Up to that point I didn’t even know, that GitLab Pages was a thing, as I only ever came in touch with Github Pages (shame on me). However, setting everything up was pretty straight forward and I’m quite happy with the outcome.

I chose the planet software Venus for the job, as it was one of the only search results I found while researching the topic. It was also the one used by some planets I already personally followed. Venus is a python program, which fetches the list of registered blogs and creates a directory with static HTML/CSS files which contain all the blog posts. That HTML can then be deployed somewhere (in our case GitLab Pages).

I configured GitLab CI to run Venus every 30 minutes. I might increase the interval at some point, as 30 minutes might be overkill.

Screenshot Planet F-Droid

Design-wise I tried to mimic the style of the F-Droid website as close as possible, but I’m not a web designer and haven’t got in touch with HTML + CSS so far, so there are still a lot of things that can be improved. However, it was a lot of fun to experiment and do trial and error to come up with the current design. If you want to jump in and help me with the CSS/HTML, feel free to contact me!

The only thing missing now are blogs! If you run a cool FOSS, Android development related project and/or blog about your adventures in the FOSS world, please apply to be included 🙂

For now the planet can be found here, but I hope that it can at some point migrate to a F-Droid subdomain.